The Wavelength
“Every emotion has a frequency. You just have to listen.”
The Wavelength is a narrative puzzle where you play as a quiet observer who enters the mind of a loved one battling cancer. You must restore balance to her inner world by manipulating waves of light, sound, and signal while also learning to face your own feelings of helplessness.
The game is set in an abstract, low-poly realm where memories take physical form and emotions flow like energy. It explores empathy, care, and presence.
Over the course of the game, players feel the gradual shift from control to understanding — discovering that true connection comes not from fixing, but from listening.
This project is inspired by my experience accompanying a close family member through breast cancer treatment. During that time, words often failed, and what mattered most was presence: the hum of a machine, the rhythm of breath, and the way light changed a room. The Wavelength turns those sensations into play, allowing players to practice empathy as an action rather than sentiment.
As the story unfolds, players gradually realize that understanding the patient is not about solving her pain, but about feeling with her — listening, aligning, and resonating until connection replaces control.
Engine
Unity
Type
Narrative Puzzle Emotional Exploration
Project Proposal for CTIN580
Project Overview
The Wavelength is an intimate 30 to 45-minute narrative interactive experience. With a single consistent mechanic of manipulating waves through reflection, refraction, and intensity, players travel through three memory worlds inside a breast cancer patient’s psyche. Each chapter reinterprets the same core system using light, sound, and heartbeat to express different emotional states. The goal is not to fix the illness but to align frequencies so that hope and presence can return.
Mechanics of the game is to manipulate waves — their reflection, refraction, and intensity — to traverse the fragmented memories of a cancer patient and offer emotional resonance, understanding, and companionship.
The gameplay remains constant, but the meaning of the wave changes in each world — from light, to sound, to heartbeat, to thought.
As the player learns to master this mechanic, they also learn to tune into another human soul.
High Concept
A director‑driven interactive experience where form is meaning. A unified wave mechanic becomes the grammar of empathy. In each world, players steer beams and bands through prisms, mirrors, fluids, and antennae. When frequencies align, the environment responds, color returns, sound harmonizes, and suppressed memories surface.
Narrative Background
The Origin
The story begins not with grand tragedy, but with something quieter, a long moment in a hospital room, where the machines hum more loudly than words.
A loved one has fallen ill. The player, a silent companion, sits beside her as she undergoes treatment for cancer. The world outside continues, yet time inside that room seems to slow and fold into itself. Between the rhythm of her breathing and the pulse of the monitors, a strange sense of stillness emerges, the space between fear and hope.
It is within this stillness that the player slips into her inner world, a place where sound, light, and signal are not physics, but feelings.
The Inner World
Inside her mind, reality behaves like energy. Memories ripple like waves; emotions refract like light. Each world the player enters is not a place in the physical sense, but an emotional landscape formed by her struggle to live with illness, not to fight it, but to coexist with it.
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Light represents hope and perception. It is the act of seeing again after despair.
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Sound represents communication and care. It is the courage to listen even when there are no words.
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Signal represents connection and presence. It is the quiet persistence of empathy, the ability to stay.
Through these three frequencies, the player helps restore harmony within her, not as a savior, but as someone who learns to listen through play.
The Role of the Player
At first, the player believes this is a puzzle to be solved. You align prisms, tune echoes, synchronize signals. Yet, with each interaction, something changes, the controls stay the same, but your understanding deepens.
You begin to realize that every wave you touch is not a mechanic, but an emotion: confusion, fear, acceptance. You are not fixing her. You are feeling with her.
The gameplay becomes an act of empathy, the more you attune yourself to her world, the more it opens. When you stop trying to control and start listening, light flows freely, sound becomes whole, and signals align.
The Emotional Core
The Wavelength is not a story about dying. It is a story about staying alive with feeling.
It asks a quiet but difficult question:
“When someone you love is in pain, what does it mean to be there for them?”
The answer is not found in action, but in resonance, the moment when your presence, no matter how small, harmonizes with another person’s struggle.
In the final scene, the patient is neither saved nor lost; she is simply at peace. The waves continue to flow. The player, too, is changed, not through victory, but through understanding.
The Philosophy
At its heart, The Wavelength is a reflection on empathy as alignment.
Every emotion has a frequency — grief, hope, fear, love.
When two frequencies meet and find harmony, healing begins.
Through light, sound, and signal, the player discovers that empathy is not something you feel once.
It is something you practice — moment by moment, wave by wave.
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Core Mechanic: Waves
Sample Level
01
Chapter Structure — Three Frequencies of the Emotion
I. Light · Searching for Hope
Begin in near darkness. Guide a faint beam through prisms and mirrored panels until a single path of light warms the room and reveals a complete outline.
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Core action Bend and split beams through rotating prisms
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Feedback static fades to harmony, color temperature warms, silhouette gains clarity
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Goal form one continuous path of light
Follow the light and bring the light to the patient.
II. Sound · Learning to Listen
In a silent, half flooded room, release gentle vibrations and tune their phase so echoes fold together. Objects begin to hum with fragments of voice.
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Core action send and tune wavefronts across water and resonant props
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Feedback phasing reduces, tones harmonize, the room sings softly
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Goal awaken three sound prints on the walls
III. Signal ·
Being Present
An open field of faint antennae. Adjust rhythm and strength so streams of signal link three beacons and hold a shared pulse along the horizon.
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Core action balance interference so compatible patterns coexist
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Feedback layers of music add gently, particles slow, the sky warms
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Goal stabilize a field wide resonance corridor
Closing Reflection
The Wavelength is, at its core, a personal dialogue between what I felt and what I could not say.
It was born from the quiet days of watching and accompanying someone I love fight to stay alive, when words were too heavy and all I could offer was presence.
Through light, sound, and signal, I wanted to translate that silence and turn empathy into interaction.
Each wave you touch in the game carries part of that memory: the hum of a machine, the warmth of a hand, the brief stillness when fear and hope coexist.
This project is not about illness or recovery. It is about connection, the kind that needs no words, only resonance.